HxGN Radio

Process improvement and Mobility across Industries

BK: Welcome to HxGN RADIO. My name’s Brian. Thanks for joining us today once again. Furthering the SMART X strategy, Hexagon recently acquired Catavolt, a U.S.-based mobile app platform provider. Catavolt offers an end-to-end platform for mobile application development and delivery, secure cloud orchestration and edge computing. Today we will discuss how Catavolt is helping its customers solve today’s problems through mobile apps that are modernising process and transforming the way that they do business today. Joining me: Tim Marinello, who is vice president of sales at Catavolt. Today’s episode, we will be discussing how Catavolt is enabling realised process improvement through mobility. Thanks for joining me, Tim.

TM: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

BK: Absolutely. Okay. Let’s hear about your role over there and then we’ll talk about Catavolt.

TM: Yeah. Absolutely. I oversee sales and marketing for Catavolt, and I have the best job in the world. I always say.

BK: Nice.

TM: My life is like an episode of ‘How It’s Made.’ I get to interact with the greatest customers. We are in manufacturing, construction, mining. We’re all over the map and we’ve got the best customers in the world. My team is amazing and we’re looking to solve real business processes in the market today through mobile. That’s what we do every day. I’ve got a stellar group, and that ranges from our headquartered location in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta, out to our west coast location in Northern California. That’s where I’m at.

BK: Nice. Love it. I like how you’re solving real world problems, too.

TM: Yeah. Exactly.

BK: It’s not just a, “Oh, you know what, we’ll solve theoretical issues and hope for that,” so it’s great.

TM: No.

BK: Hear a lot about that here. This is a good thing. All right. Tell us about Catavolt.

TM: Yeah. We were founded in 2008. Catavolt was really birthed out of some pain points in the market. We have a strong manufacturing presence, and what we noticed was there are … For the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a huge investment in IT infrastructure and backend systems that companies are building their businesses off of, and those legacy systems, as well as on-prem systems, are not easy to access and interface with at every level of the business.

What we do is we really have three parts of our technology. The first part is our connections and integration piece. We’re able to connect to on-prem, cloud, legacy systems, and then orchestrate different parts and pieces within the systems that your workforce relies on, and orchestrate that to a job-specific, role-specific function in the cloud and offer mobile solutions through a user interface that’s native to Android, iOS, web. It’s basically helping you streamline and utilise your processes in a more efficient way, offering bottom-line solutions to the business.

TM: We’re part of Hexagon for the last 40 days. It’s been a great, great opportunity for us.

BK: Nice.

TM: Because we have served similar markets, like I mentioned, in mining and construction and manufacturing and across other verticals. In those 40 days, we’ve already been able to do to the speed of the development platform, provide three specific project apps to the market. One of them is STA Online. Taking advantage of the SMART X strategy, we’ve been able to offer that to PPM, and we have several other projects in mining and across other divisions that we’re looking forward to help provide solutions to customers.

BK: Nice.

TM: Mm-hmm.

BK: Yes. Providing solutions. You mentioned earlier finding the pain points and solving those as well. What are some of the challenges that Catavolt addresses?

TM: Yeah. That’s a great question. What we do is, we have to identify business transformation-minded folks, so people that are operational excellence, Lean, Six Sigma-type of folks that are looking to streamline business process. What we’re able to do is take different parts of the systems that they interact with and provide that in real time from any device. We’ve got folks in, let’s say, manufacturing.

BK: Mm-hmm.

TM: Folks like Johnson & Johnson, who wanted to streamline their maintenance work orders and they needed to overlay their time and attendance or their work order management system and their parts on hand in real time and close out jobs. We’ve also got customers in the construction space who want to know in real time what work orders they can close out, what time and attendance issues that could be solved through knowing where people are at, where the schedule is for job completion, whether or not they’re on budget and that kind of thing. We are really trying to solve issues that we’re identifying, and we’re calling the largest companies in the world and we’re helping them change the way they do business.

TM: Yeah. Speed is the number-one benefit. Like I mentioned, we are 40 days into our relationship with Hexagon.

BK: Mm-hmm.

TM: We’ve delivered three solutions. One of the slogans that a customer coined for us is, “I dream an idea up on Sunday and I’m able to build it on Monday and deliver it on Tuesday.”

BK: Wow. That’s awesome.

TM: Yeah. We’re changing the way that people think about how to offer mobile solutions. No more VPNs, no more having to interact with multiple data systems at a PC. We can build parts and pieces from different systems and integrate and read and write those data points back to SAP or Oracle from any device, no matter where you’re at.

BK: Wow. Man, that’s crazy.

TM: Mm-hmm.

BK: I love that.

TM: Yeah.

BK: What are some other stories?

TM: Yeah. This is the best part of my job. I get to tell stories.

BK: Yes.

TM: We have other customers in the mining or aggregate space where shipping’s a huge part of their business. We work with guys like Lafarge or Vulcan or Granite Construction, where their bottom line is affected by whether or not they have a competitor in a shipping lane close to them. They need to be able to adjust margins, know where they’ve lost, know why and bid that next project at an appropriate margin level to win, secure the business. What we’ve been able to do is interact their close loss reporting, which is in a separate database with their CRM information with mapping, and say, “Okay. Well, hey. Within 30 miles in this direction, you’ve lost 60% of the bids that you’ve put out here. You need to adjust your margin down to win that business and secure the project.” It is accelerating the new customer, new project acquisition efforts of our trucking-minded customer base.

BK: Nice.

TM: It’s really transforming and increasing the bottom line for that area. We have customers in every industry, basically.

BK: Excellent. Have you heard feedback just even from the short time with Hexagon?

TM: Yeah. There’s a great buzz.

BK: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

TM: The reality is that no matter what industry you’re in, being able to securely access key information at any role and responsibility within the organisation in real time can transform your ability to do your job well and to increase speed and accuracy –

BK: Yeah.

TM: – and the importance of the systems that your business is relying on for its competitive advantage in the market. We can make that happen in a more efficient manner. The beauty of the Catavolt platform is we can either be a mobile extension like in STA Online, where we’re able to take an existing product and be the mobile arm of that solution –

BK: Mm-hmm.

TM: – or start from scratch with a business process and match your business process, your efficiencies that you want to gain by role and by area of your business with the systems that are going to help you increase your bottom line in that instance.

BK: Nice. I was very impressed by the dream to production aspect, too.

TM: Yeah.

BK: The efficiency and the speed is amazing.

TM: Yep.

BK: Nice.

TM: Yeah. Seriously, we are talking to folks. Everyone wants to use the benefits of mobile that they have in their personal life in their professional life, right?

BK: Absolutely.

TM: Nobody wants to go back to the office, back to their workstation.

BK: Yeah.

TM: Nobody wants to walk however long to do something they should be able to do in real time.

BK: Yeah.

TM: Take advantage of the native features, Siri. You don’t want to have to type up a brief, you can just use Siri and –

BK: Yeah.

TM: – translate whatever notes that you need on a work order, hit send, close it out, pick up the next one, for example. It’s those types of capabilities that we’re able to not only improve access to backend secure systems in a very safe and secure manner, but we’re also able to do the development and the maintenance at the front end. As a platform benefit, we’re maintaining accuracy and security with iOS and Android and Windows in different versioning, so you don’t have to have three different apps for the same –

BK: That’s nice.

TM: Yeah. The same objective.

BK: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it makes sense.

TM: Yep.

BK: Technology’s there. It’s been there. Why not put it together, make it simple?

TM: Yeah, exactly.

BK: It’s a palm-of-their-hand, pretty much, thing.

TM: Yeah.

BK: I like that. Awesome. Well, anything else you want to share?

TM: Yes. Please come visit catavolt.com. Please reach out. We want to understand what business pain that you’re facing in your specific line of work within your organisation, within your market, and we want to help you take your business problem and be … offer a mobile app as a solution to that so that you can offer that solution to your customers, whether that be internal or to your market. Do it this calendar quarter, not this fiscal year.

BK: I love it. Catavolt.com. Check it out.

TM: Yeah.

BK: Perfect.

TM: All right.

BK: Tim, thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for –

TM: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate it.

BK: Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time and sharing everything. Be sure to tune in to more episodes on HxGNRADIO.com, iTunes, SoundCloud, or Stitcher Radio. Thanks for listening.